Road Tax

[FROSTYBALLS]

1 minute ago, Hybrid21 said:

The government should be encouraging people to buy greener cars by making them more financially attractive to potential buyers.

Road tax is one of the easier ways to do this 👍

Well, one could say they are using vehicle tax to encourage people into less polluting vehicles by not applying vehicle tax to Battery electric vehicles and applying a modest reduction in vehicle tax to alternative fuel vehicles.

[Centaur]

There seems to be some confusion here that VED has got something to do with saving the planet.  It hasn't, it's just another tax.  Politicians love the term 'green taxes', as it makes it look like they are doing something and somehow justifies raising one tax or another.  The reality is that they are spending far more money than they ever raise in taxes, so they constantly need to find new and inventive ways of increasing revenue.  That's always going to be unpopular, so dressing it up as 'green' deflects criticism and can be defended as being 'voluntary'.

As can be seen from some of the comments above, it does work rather well for the politicians - rather than their being presented with a unified chorus of objection, everyone gets distracted with arguments about the 'green' bit and whether or not it's 'fair'.

Our attention would be better spent on scrutinising how the money is spent and maximising the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of that spending.  Just an observation....

[Flatcoat]

6 hours ago, Centaur said:

There seems to be some confusion here that VED has got something to do with saving the planet.  It hasn't, it's just another tax.  Politicians love the term 'green taxes', as it makes it look like they are doing something and somehow justifies raising one tax or another.  The reality is that they are spending far more money than they ever raise in taxes, so they constantly need to find new and inventive ways of increasing revenue.  That's always going to be unpopular, so dressing it up as 'green' deflects criticism and can be defended as being 'voluntary'.

As can be seen from some of the comments above, it does work rather well for the politicians - rather than their being presented with a unified chorus of objection, everyone gets distracted with arguments about the 'green' bit and whether or not it's 'fair'.

Our attention would be better spent on scrutinising how the money is spent and maximising the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of that spending.  Just an observation....

Completely agree….. alleged green taxes disproportionately affect those who can least afford them the most. All taxation is simply legalised extortion. 

[philip42h]

I've never really seen the point of, nor supported, "pay to pollute" taxes ...

Tax is the way that government raises money to do what government does. We may or may not approve of the taxation policy, or, indeed, how the government spends our money, but we do have the opportunity to vote for someone else next time.

[Composite Guru]

2 hours ago, philip42h said:

I've never really seen the point of, nor supported, "pay to pollute" taxes ...

Tax is the way that government raises money to do what government does. We may or may not approve of the taxation policy, or, indeed, how the government spends our money, but we do have the opportunity to vote for someone else next time.

Totally agree. If you don’t want to pollute then ban the cars. Don’t let people pay more. They will just find the money. Doesn’t help. 

[Mike2222]

10 hours ago, Centaur said:

it makes it look like they are doing something

Very much agree with this concept. It's too easy to say that "all politicians are crooks" etc, but I honestly believe they are not inherently bad people. Yes, some are narcissistic or believe in their own cult of personality, but in the modern age, where one needs an online "presence" to succeed in self promotion, I feel most seem to come off this way, when it's probably the significant minority grabbing most of the headlines. 

 

The phrase "all politics starts local" is surprisingly apt - Most humans make decisions based on their own families/career/lives first, and most of the urgently needed climate change policy ideas/mandates will take decades to come to fruition, but a politician runs on election cycles of maybe 5yrs maximum, so if they cannot show results in that timescale to point to what they have achieved whilst in post, majority of voters are fickle and will turn on them.

 

Very few people have the strength of character to properly champion these sorts of things for the time it takes to see the fruits of their labours, as well as having the pure luck that their constituents decide to stand by them for the duration. Which is not meant to be a dig - everyone has bills to pay, and many have dependants to support. And then the problem with saying, "well they shouldn't have gone into a life of public service then, because that's the job", is that dooms the nation into only ever having the independantly (or inherited) wealthy as their representatives/policy makers, with all the inherent problems that brings. 

 

Which is a stupidly longwinded way of saying, I agree - tax is tax/death&taxes/VED is just a name for a governmental revenue stream and not meant to be specifically linked to a vehicular-based public spending policy, and this was a matter of indisputable public record well before the car was available for sale, so move on 🤣. To draw an analogy from the words of taskmaster - "all the information was on the card"!